n Singapore, young women melt down the jewelry given to them by their
in-laws, refashioning the gold into rings and necklaces in more modern
stylesor else they sell it, using the cash to buy a computer so the couple
can get ahead. In rural western Mexico, young couples walk hand in hand
in the plaza, or even dance together in the dark corners of the town disco,
rather than courting as their parents had, in secret whispers through a
chink in a stone walland the intimacy these couples share during
courtship is only a taste of what is to come later, as they luxuriate in the privacy of neolocal residence, newly accessible through hard-earned dollars
from mens sojourns in the United States as migrant laborers. Among the
Huli of Papua New Guinea, young spouses often live together, rather than
in the separate mens and womens houses of the past, claiming that family houses, as they are called, are the modern and Christian way for
loving couples to live. In Nigeria, although marriage is still very much
regarded as a relationship that creates obligations between kin groups as
well as between individuals, courtship at least has been transformed into a
moment for young men and women to demonstrate their modern individuality. Around the world, young people are talking about the importance
of affective bonds in creating marital ties, deliberately positioning themselves in contrast to their parents and grandparents.
This volume discusses how women and men from Mexico, Papua New
modern
Loves
Introduction
political arenas in which gendered persons negotiate labor, sex, reproduction, consumption, mobility, health, and the care of older and younger
dependent generations. These explorations of gendered axes of power
were vital for demonstrating that realms of experience that previous generations of (largely male) anthropologists had disregarded as trivial or personal were actually sites of complex strategizing and struggle. To think
about couples only in terms of power, however, is to miss the fact that men
and women may also care for the conjugal partners with whom they are
simultaneously involved in daily battles over bodies, power, and resources.
(This emphasis on conict and inequality, to the exclusion of love and tenderness, is particularly notable in public health research on gender inequality and sexuality. Sexuality has been largely invisible as a category of interest in public health except in terms of commercial sex, sexual violence, and
bargaining around contraceptives or condom useall moments when the
gendered optic is invoked in terms of conict or domination, rather than
pleasure or affect.) We argue that to study gendered relationships it is necessary to attend both to the socially, politically, and economically structured inequalities within which couples negotiate and to the possibilities
for tenderness, pleasure, and cooperation that exist in spite of these
inequalities. Incorporating this dual focus of attentionwithout simplifying matters by, for example, asserting that love is an ideology that seals
men and women into various relations of inequalitymay seem like a
stretch theoretically, yet it is no more than many of us do in our own daily
lives, in our own intimate relationships.
Keeping this dual focus in mind, the chapters point out that it is one
thing to marry for love and another to stay married for love. In other
words, romantic love is not the same as companionate marriage. While
romantic love may be something that companionately married couples
strive to maintain during married lifeindeed, this is a dening aspect of
companionate marriage in many of the cases discussed hereprivileging
romantic attraction and individual choice when selecting a spouse is, in
fact, quite different from being able (and wanting) to prioritize the ongoing affective primacy of the conjugal unit. For one, parents, siblings, and
other kin may dispute the centrality of the marital bond, insisting on the
equal or greater value of their own emotional and economic claims, making love both a practice through which kin ties are constructed and, at
times, a force in tension with those same ties. Relatedly, economic interdependencebetween women and men, between the generations, and
between afnally related groupscontinues to exist, often in tension with
modern
Loves
Introduction
modern
Loves
Introduction
its emphasis on the God-given unity of marriage, was also crucial in the
development of the idea that love between the sexes is to be regarded as
the supreme value of life on earth (1987:135). Arguing that literature
played an important role in promoting the companionate ideal, he
observes (rather ethnocentrically) that the Puritanism that is already
strong in [Spensers Faerie Queene] nds its supreme expression in Paradise
Lost which is, among other things, the greatest and indeed the only epic of
married life (137).
Other perhaps less literarily-minded historians propose an alternative
origin story for companionate marriage in Europe in which the poor, having little stake in ensuring ties with the right families, were the rst ones
to marry for love rather than lineage or property, while the landed aristocracy lagged behind (Benton 1966; Zeldin 1973). Historian Jean-Louis
Flandrin, taking issue with the courtly love theory, argues that marriage in
which personal sentiment took precedence over other considerations was a
literary fantasy that only started shaping actual practice when wealth
became less a matter of land or other forms of real property and more one
of cultural capital. Only then would the love marriage cease to threaten the
social order (in Illouz 1997:213).
In the North American context, magazines and court documents concerning divorce suggest that marriages predicated on romantic loveand
divorces predicated in part on its absenceoccurred as early as the late
1700s or early 1800s. Lantz, for example, cites a case from 1842 in which
the Connecticut State Legislature granted a divorce to one Jabez Phelps
from his wife, Laura, based on her desertion and neglect of duty, among
other things, which Phelps himself attributed to her lack of love for him:
about the time of said desertion, she declared that she did not love her
husband, that she never did, and never could, and never would love him
. . . that she had nothing against him, he had always used her well, but she
. . . had rather go to the poor house, and be supported by the town, than to
live with him and all his property . . . only she did not love him (Connecticut Session Laws, 1842: 1617, in Lantz 1982). Of course, such documents do not tell us the social position of those involved, what options
Laura may have had, or even what Laura herself actually said, thought, and
did (the preceding transcript was based on her husbands testimony). Nevertheless, that concern about love was so elaborated in this document and
in others analyzed by Lantz, and was, moreover, juxtaposed with economic
security as a basis for marriage, suggests at the very least that love was a
possible, if contested, rationale for marriage.
modern
Loves
Both archival and more ethnographic observers of life in North America and Europe documented a shift, dated variously from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, toward a marital ideal characterized
by a pronounced emphasis on emotional, social, and sexual intimacy (Stone
1977; Bott 1957 [1971]; DEmilio 1999; Trimberger 1983). Participants in
these companionate unions argued that they were inherently more satisfying and pleasurable than more traditional forms of union, but another
aspect of companionate marriages appeal seems to have been the way people used these gendered performances to signify their own modernity
(Stansell 2000). Similarly, many of the chapters in this volume depict
young couples arguing for the superiority of affectively oriented relationships by emphasizing the break with tradition, and so it seems worth noting how the deliberate crafting of a more modern gendered self was part of
the cultural apparatus of these earlier shifts in marital ideals.
Around the kitchen table and between the sheets, men and women may
make the history of love, but of course they do not make it as they please.
Addressing questions of causality, Skolnik explores how demographic, economic, and cultural factors came together to cause a marked shift toward a
companionate ideal in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
United States. Demographic transformations included declining fertility
and infant mortality, so that couples had fewer children, more of whom
survived. Combined with gains in life expectancy, these demographic
transformations (which were themselves the product of broader economic
and political changes) meant that couples spent a relatively larger proportion of their married life together without young children in their care.
Skolnik suggests that intimacy-building stepped into the vacuum created
by the decline in the relative proportion of their married years that couples
spent caring for children. Urbanization and the spread of wage labor also
promoted a nuclear family ideal by reducing peoples access to and dependence on their own extended families and by increasing the privacy and
mutual interdependence of the conjugal unit (for a discussion of similar
changes in Mexico, see de la Pea 1984). Along similar lines, DEmilio in
his work on the history of gay sexuality in the United States (1999) argues
that rural to urban migration and industrialization, along with a decline in
household production, were the key material changes that made modern
sexualities possible. Eva Illouz makes a parallel argument, saying that the
expansion of the labor market in the rst decades of the twentieth century
enabled some women to become less nancially dependent on potential
husbands, which had the further consequence of shifting womens expectations of marriage from economic security to emotional fulllment (1997).
Introduction
10
modern
Loves
suggests that the consequent focus on individual achievement and consumption as markers of success reshaped peoples attitudes toward intimate
relations.
As in the North American context, however, the increasingly widespread conviction that love is the legitimate basis for marriage cannot be
attributed solely to material or structural changes. The globalization of
images and proto-narratives of possible lives (Appadurai 1996) has also
shaped peoples desires and worked to link this conjugal form to ideologies
of modern progress. For example, Larkin asserts that Hausa viewers interpret imported Indian lms as illustrating an attractive alternative to both
Western modernity and Nigerian traditionalism in the realm of romantic
relations (1997). Similarly, Wardlow observed while living with Papua
New Guinea nurses that they often spoke of Harlequin and Mills and Boon
novelsparticularly those concerning relationships between doctors and
nursesas instructional manuals for how to conduct their romantic lives
(see also Wardlow 1996). Importantly, economic transformations often
work in concert with, and partially structure, globalized cultural forms:
that these women were nurses meant that they were literate enough to read
romance novels, had the money to buy them or were embedded in social
networks that exchanged them, and were sometimes nancially independent enough to resist the less companionate arrangements their kin or
boyfriends tried to foist on them. Similarly, the Mexican telenovelas that
have played such a central role in teaching women more modern forms of
desire are only accessible to them because migrant remittances have made
satellite dishes an affordable luxuryand because the Salinas administration, to shore up the ruling partys fragile hold on political power, worked
hard at installing electrical power in towns throughout rural Mexico.
One observation we might make in this regard is that it would be useful to add contraceptives and the social marketing of family planning that
has often been a key aspect of international family planning programs to
the list of factors that have contributed to the globalization of the companionate ideal. We do not mean here that contraceptives have been a sort of
technological magic bullet that has inevitably modernized intimate relationships. Instead, we follow the argument of Schneider and Schneider
(1995), who have described how class differences in the pace of fertility
decline in Sicily led to the rise of reproductive stigma, in which poverty,
high fertility, and lack of sexual control became intertwined in the social
imaginary for the rst time. Kanaaneh (2002), describing the prestige of
small companionate families among Palestinians in the Galilee, writes of a
Introduction
11
In very diverse ethnographic contexts, the authors whose work is represented here have found similar transformations in how people construct
and represent their intimate relationships. As cultural anthropologists, we
have found ourselves simultaneously fascinated and discomted by the
similarities. We are fascinated because there do seem to be real underlying
commonalities in how the people with whom we work talk about love and
marriage. We are discomted because focusing on these similarities seems
to veer perilously close to putting us in the position of serving up reheated
modernization theory, in which inexorable social and economic changes
produce progressprogress that can be measured by the degree to which
the consumption styles, tastes, and preferences of people around the world
come to mimic those of Western societies.
That we are not making a modernization argument is apparent for a
number of reasons. First, our emphasis here is as much on the differences
in how companionate marriage is interpreted worldwide as it is on similarities, so we make it abundantly clear that this is not a story about some
inevitable march toward global cultural homogenization. Second, in several of the chapters, the ideal of companionate marriage is largely experienced through its absence; in other words, the cultural project described by
these authors is not how people manage a shift toward a more companionate ideal, but how they negotiate the gulf between an increasingly pervasive
ideology and their actual experiences. Third, our focus on individual
agency highlights howfar from being the inexorable product of changes
in the social and economic environmentthe shift toward a more companionate ideal is the product of deliberate strategizing on the part of selfconscious actors. Finally, that this is not a modernist approach to cultural
change should be clear from our skepticism about claims that companionate marriage is inherently superior to other forms of intimate relations
that the measure of human progress can be marked by a societys shift from
Figs. Intro.1, Intro.2, Intro.3. These three images from around the world illustrate the
ways in which family planning promotional materials have drawn on and reinforced
ideas about the relationship between love and low fertility. In the rst one (above), produced by the Secretariat of the Pacic Communitys (SPC) Population Project, a couple
gazes lovingly at each other under a romantic moon, presumably enjoying the affective
fruits of their demographic choices. In the second image (facing page, top), produced by
the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University (which promotes the
global use of natural family planning methods), a young woman from Rwanda embraces
her partner as they review together the CycleBead necklace, in which a string of colorcoded beads represents the fertile and safe times in a womans menstrual cycle. Again,
as in the poster from SPC, emotional warmth and reproductive control are visually
linked. The third illustration (facing page, bottom), borrowed from Kanaanehs Birthing
the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, the cover of a pamphlet on family
planning produced by the Department of Health Promotion and Education, Public
Health Department, Ministry of Health, Israel, appeals to Palestinians in its invocation
of modernity and middle class status (2002:79). While Kanaaneh does not call our
attention to it, this image shares with the others here the same presentation of the pleasures of togetherness as one of its key visual messages.
14
modern
Loves
the burka to the bikini (see Stout 2001). Although many of our informants
argued to us that this new form of relationship represents real progress for
women, we see the shift to a companionate ideal as perhaps more accurately described as bringing a series of gains and losses, both for men and
for women.
Rather than linking companionate marriage to the narrative of modernization, we insert it into the analytic of modernity, which refers both to
(1) a periodization of Western history marked by a belief in progress
(although sometimes also by alienation) spurred by a growth of scientic
consciousness, an emphasis on autonomous individualism, and the burgeoning of capitalism as an economic order and ideological framework,
and (2) how people in different world areas have been impelled to engage
the progressivist project of Western modernity (Knauft 2002:13),
ambivalently embracing, resisting, or reshaping narratives that force people to position themselves (and their cultures or nations) in relation to tradition and the modern. By attending to the intimate, interpersonal, and
affective dimensions of modernity, the cases discussed in this volume make
an important contribution to this literature. These chapters make clear
that modernity can be at once globalized and vernacular (Knauft 2002),
material and emotional: the idealization of companionate marriage is
increasingly pervasive, but also locally variable. It is about interpersonal
affect, but affect that is underpinned by certain changes in the organization
of production and consumption. We situate love and companionate marriage in three central problematics of modernity: the emergence of the
individualized self; the related importance of commodity consumption to
practices of self-crafting, as well as the signicance of love in the context of
commoditized social relations; and the deployment of discourses about
progressive gender relations as a means to claim a modern identity,
whether this is on the level of interpersonal relations or the nation-state.
Love and Individualism
i am through you so i3
A number of our contributors observe that when young men and women
talk about love, they may be talking about their specic relationships,
desires, and practices, but they are also using love as a trope through which
to assert a modern identity. This modern identity is very much about the
cultivation of a more individualized selfa self who has a particular style,
Introduction
15
16
modern
Loves
The theorization of the relationship between love and capitalism has a long
history and multiple strands. Engels, usually posited as the apical ancestor
of such theorizations, argued that in granting people economic independence from parents, wage labor facilitated the possibility of romantic love
(1985). Freed from the desire to maintain or augment ones holdings of
private property, particularly land, from one generation to the next, the
laborer was able to forge relationships based on authentic sentiment rather
than on an instrumental logic. Also working within a Marxist framework,
but far more skeptical about love, feminist theorists have argued that the
conceptual distinction between public and private depends on a capitalist
regime in which men subject themselves to the alienating world of work,
while the feminized domestic realm is constructed as a safe haven in which
social relations are untainted by calculation or interest. Love, then, far
from being a human capacity liberated by wage labor ( la Engels), is critiqued as a mystifying ideology that serves to reinforce a particular construction of female gender as seless, sensitive, and nurturing while also
allocating to women the task of reproducing the labor force (Van Every
1996).
Introduction
17
Taking the Marxist feminist argument one step further, cultural studies
theorist Laura Kipnis draws on Marxist language to argue that companionate marriage not only facilitates the reproduction of labor but in fact has
itself become an onerous mode of production, for both men and women.
According to Kipnis, modern married couplesindoctrinated by ideologies of intimacy, the value of commitment, and the idea that marriage
takes workslog away at the work of conjugality.
Wage labor, intimacy laborare you ever not on the clock? . . .
When monogamy becomes work, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and delity extracted like labor from
employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of
rigid shop-oor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands
of the world choke-chained to the reproduction machinery . . . It
requires a different terminology. This mode of intimacy we will designate . . . surplus monogamy . . . (1998:291)
Just who prots from this surplus monogamy is unclear in Kipniss
model, making the labor analogy less than satisfying. Nonetheless, Kipnis
makes the casetongue in cheek we think, although were not surethat
adultery can be considered a kind of workplace protest, a way of organizing grievances about existing conditions into a collectively imagined form
(294) or, in its more utopian libidinal moments, the attempt to imagine
through sheer will, a different moral and affective universe (296). While
this manifesto is clever and entertaining, it is bound to strike the anthropologist as ethnocentric on multiple levels; for one, it assumes a voluntaristic and implicitly Western actor who can choose to commit adultery
or not. The anthropologist, on the other hand, might immediately think
more situationally of mine workers and sex workers around the world, who
are caught in economic contexts in which choice is not so clear-cut (Campbell 1997, 2000).4 Despite such limitations, Kipniss piece is valuable as an
exercise in thinking about the disjunctures between the ideal of companionate marriage and its lived realities, particularly when companionate
marriageand monogamy, as a key symbol of the trust and intimacy at the
center of companionate marriageare increasingly framed as markers of
modern progress.
One nal theorization of the relationship between marriage and capitalismand perhaps the one that is of the most current interest to ethnographersfocuses less on the way love articulates with the organization of
18
modern
Loves
Introduction
19
or soap. Without wanting to argue that love is a luxury reserved only for
those who have assured themselves of food and shelter, we think the Gregg
and Erickson chapters do suggest that it can be particularly challenging to
construct love-oriented relationships under circumstances of intense material insecurity.
Love, Gender, and Narratives of Progress
While our contributors sometimes diverge in what they think most characterizes companionate marriage in their respective eldsites, or in the factors that have generated a shift toward companionate marriage, they all
foreground gender in their analyses, and all agree that an examination of
love and companionate marriage entails a focus on gender. First, marriage
in most areas of the world continues to be premised on sexual difference;
thus, entrenched notions of biologically-based gender and reproduction
still dictate which couples may obtain legal and religious sanction to marry.
Reciprocally, the social expectation that young people will ultimately enter
a heterosexual and reproductive marriage reinforces gender as both identity category and practice, with young women and men disciplined to
behave in certain ways because it is expected that they will someday be
wives/mothers and husbands/fathers. As Borneman writes, marriage has
conventionally been conceptualized as establishing and giving gender its
fullest meaning in heterosexual union (1996:220) and thus powerfully
forties what Butler has called the illusion of an interior and organizing
gender core (1990:337; see also Rubin 1975). Indeed, marital ideals shape
gendered practice even in intimate same-sex relationships, such as those
between Hyderabadi men and their hijra wives, a topic poignantly taken
up by Gayatri Reddy in this volume. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, expectations for gender can conict with expectations for companionate marriage, with potentially dire health consequences when it is assumed
that conjugal emotional delity will be expressed through mutual sexual
delity, an assumption that may be incompatible with gendered (usually
masculine) prestige structures that reward extramarital sexual conquest or
the ability to nancially support more than one sexual partner.
One question that can be asked, then, is whether the ideology of companionate marriage has particular implications for gender identities and
practices. Is it a potentially emancipatory ideology that can liberate individuals from heteronormativity? Alternatively, is it an increasingly global
regulatory ideal that further naturalizes gender categories and marginal-
20
modern
Loves
Introduction
21
Fig. Intro.4. This drawing by graphic artist Marjane Satrapi, featured in a March 2005
article discussing how Iraqs newly elected government would choose to interpret
Islamic law in light of how other Islamic countries have negotiated this complex terrain,
used changes in womens head-covering and makeup (note especially the sly grin and
the hearts on the headscarf in the last two frames) to make a point about the evolving
middle ground between Islamists, who want to stone adulterers to death, and secularists, who want a pure separation of law and religion. (The New York Times, March 13,
2005; used with permission of the artist.)
Fig. Intro.5. Images such as this one of Afghani women in burkas were frequently seen
in major U.S. newspapers in the days following the postSeptember 11 U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan, and on November 17 Laura Bush took over the presidents weekly radio
address to urge worldwide condemnation of the treatment of women in Afghanistan.
The oppression of womenfor which the burka was used as evidenceserved in her
address to symbolize the barbarity of the Taliban. The original caption to this photo in
the New York Times (published February 23, 2002), read, in part, Every catastrophe
begets its own linguistic falloutwords and phrases forged by the awful novelty of the
moment or catapulted from obscurity into everyday speech. That the burka became a
sort of visual shorthand for the Talibans barbarity indicates how deeply intertwined
gender and modernity are in our everyday lives. (Photograph by Ruth Fremson, The
New York Times; used with permission.)
24
modern
Loves
tain the admiration, attachment, and desire of the other by not dominating
or exploiting the other. Finally, implicit in the ideology of companionate
marriage is the prioritization of and greater personal investment in the
marital bond over other relationships. All this might seem to make for a situation in which wives would have equal authority over household resource
allocation, more inuence over a man than his natal family, and more control over reproductive strategies.
And while this all seems fairly logical, the empirical story is, of course,
more complex, as the cases in this volume aptly demonstrate. Thus, while
sustaining a sense of skepticism about narratives that link gender with
modern progress, it is important to examine the potential benets and
costs of companionate marriage, particularly since some ethnographic data
suggest that women in particular strive for this marital form.5 In practice
there are a number of potential costs to companionate marriage. Holland
and Eisenhart (1990) argue, for example, that the American cultural model
of equality in romantic love masks a stark gender inequality and that ideologies of romantic love may exacerbate female subordination by persuading women that staying in the relationship is the loving thing to do (see
also Mahoney 1995). Rebhun suggests that a similar dynamic may be at
work in Brazil; as one of her female informants said, For me, love is the
renunciation of I . . . When you like another person, when you love . . . you
give yourself totally to that person, you forget yourself and remember to
love the other person (1999a:173). Moreover, in some contexts, companionate heterosexual marriagehowever egalitarianmay be more constricting to women than existing alternatives. In her discussion of matrifocal and women-headed households in the Afro-Caribbean and in West
Sumatra, Evelyn Blackwood notes that there is ample evidence of kin
practices and intimate relations without marriage or lacking marriage in
the normative model (2005:14) in which women control household production and wealth. Thus, the increasingly globalized images of modern,
romantic love may, in some contexts, only serve to denormalize other
forms of relatedness (15) and thus seal women into heterosexual unions
that are disadvantageous.
Moreover, marital ideologies are hardly the only factors that shape gender relations within marriage. Discourses of romantic love and companionate marriage may imply a kind of equality, while at the same time local
constructions of gender and economic structures may sustain gender
asymmetry. Thus Giddens notes the underlying assumption (more often
than not contradicted by reality) that both men and women are equally free
Introduction
25
to walk away when the magic is gone (1992); the fact that people say they
marry for love does not mean that women cease to be economically dependent on men. It is the combination of womens economic dependence on
men and ideologies about the importance of love in making a relationship
successful, argues Cancian (1986), that has pushed women to specialize in
the work of love. Relationships forged by choice, pleasure, and psychological intimacy may be less durable than marriages based on and maintained
through economic ties between families, and so it follows that developing
an expertise in emotion and the pleasure of others is a critical skill that
women need in order to help these fragile relationships survive.
Around the world the popularization of this idea of bonds based on sentiment has coincided with rising rates of marital dissolution. In a sense, in
relationships based on choice, the partners must keep choosing each other
long after the marriage ceremony; womenand their childrenmay be
put in a vulnerable economic position if men cease to make this choice.
Particularly in the United States, some who have noted the trend have
tried to stem the tide through interventions such as marriage education
programs and welfare reform. The idea behind these efforts seems to be to
exalt marriages ideological status, to provide people with the interpersonal
skills to be more successful at the project of intimacy building, and to
reduce government support for programs that were seen by those on both
the left and the right as having weakened womens dependence on marriage.6 On the most basic level, this book speaks to the futility of those
efforts. The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no going back to a time
in which agricultural production, kinship organization, and cultural forces
intertwined to make the cofn or the sea the only respectable exit strategies for marriages gone bad, and the priesthood the only route to avoiding
it altogether.7
Finally, companionate marriage may be hazardous to womens health;
for most women around the world, their greatest risk of HIV infection
comes from having sex with their husbands (UNAIDS 2000). Increasing
attachment to a companionate ideal, with its attendant emphasis on mutual
monogamy as proof of love, may actually increase womens risk of marital
HIV infection by reinforcing their commitment to HIV risk denial (see
Hirsch et al. 2002, reprinted in this volume; Sobo 1995a, Sobo 1995b;
Smith, this volume). Other factors (such as labor migration and masculine
prestige structures) may continue to create conditions in which it is more
likely than not that men will form extramarital partnerships. In rural Mexico, the shift to an ideal of companionate marriage has hardly meant that
26
modern
Loves
men have given up their right to extramarital sex; rather, they just work
harder to be keep these relationships a secretand their wives, eager to
believe that their marriages live up to the modern ideal, are happy to collude in the silence. Thus, increased investment in the ideals of intimacy,
devotion, and constancy may create a marital environment of greater disease risk when these ideals are either untenable in practice or no longer as
seductive as they once were.
Organization of the Book
Introduction
27
28
modern
Loves
intimacy functions as a kind of emotional glue for companionate marriagesmaking younger women even more committed than were their
mothers to ignoring evidence of their husbands dalliances.
In contrast, Ericksons chapter in this part, as well as Reddys in the
next, suggest that companionship and sexual passion are opposed. Erickson
describes how adolescent Latino couples in Los Angeles are sometimes
forced, in a context of emotional immaturity and economic insecurity, to
respond to pregnancy by making decisions about marriage and parenthood. Thus, in some contexts, sexual intimacy is seen as a crucial building
block in creating and sustaining marital emotional intimacy, whereas in
others, sexual passion is seen as impeding genuine trust and companionship.
In the Nigerian context, young Igbo men and women equally expect
delity during premarital romances. However, constructions of masculinity award status and a sense of accomplishment to men who have extramarital partners; thus, once a couple is married, a more hierarchical gender
dynamic emerges, and it is in the expectations about and consequences of
marital indelity that this inequality is most profound. Specically, a man
who cheats on his wife risks little social condemnation, as long as he provides nancially for his children. Moreover, within mens peer groups,
having female lovers is a sign of continuing masculine prowess and economic success. Igbo wives, however, are expected to be faithful, and many
women continue to deploy ideals of intimacy and love to inuence their
wayward husbands.
Of course it is important to keep in mind that the broad structural
transformations that seem to underpin companionate marriage reshape
intimacy via their effect on the strategies formed in the hearts and minds of
individual men and women. Thus, a third set of questions relates to who,
specically, is pushing for these more companionate relationships, and
why. What specic advantages and disadvantages are actually present in
this new form of relationship? While people may argue that companionate
marriages are more egalitarian, the chapters in part 3, Gender Politics
and Implications, trace out both the costs and the benets of modern love
and examine marriage as an institution through which gender is negotiated
and reproduced.
Among poor women living in Brazilian favelas (shantytowns) sex is less
of an emotional glue for relationships with men and more of a weapon
against them. Life is very hard in the favelas, and the possibility of an
enduring companionate marriage seems remote. As one of Jessica Greggs
Introduction
29
30
modern
Loves
Notes
1. Giddens calls these relationships bound together by pleasure pure relationships, but we prefer not to use his term, both because it seems overly evaluative
and because it does not quite capture the way in which this shift is, in some places,
more symbolic than material.
Nevertheless, we recognize that companionate marriage may not be the ideal
term either. A central limitation of the phrase is that there are certainly marriages
in which one observes a denite form of companionship that is not what we mean
by companionate marriage. In Mexico, for example, Dona Catarina cried when
talking about how she missed her viejo after his death, and the tenderness she felt
for himthe product of obligations respectfully fullled, of years of careful attention to the minute details of daily lifewas denitely palpable. It was not, however,
the explicit goal or raison dtre of their marriage. Thus, we differentiate between
marriages in which companionship and intimacy developed over the years as a
product of living together and those in which companionship and intimacy are the
reason for getting and staying married.
2. Recent ethnographic treatments of love and marriage include Rebhun
1999a,b, in rural northeastern Brazil; Kanaaneh 2002, among Palestinians in Israel;
Ahearn 2001, in Nepal; Cole 1991, in coastal Portugal; Maggi 2001, in Pakistan;
Pashigian 2002, among infertile couples in Vietnam; and Inhorn 1996, in Egypt.
3. e. e. cummings.
4. One also wonders about the advisability of advocating adultery as an emancipatory practice in a world where condom use is impeded for multiple reasons,
Introduction
31
where marriage is most womens biggest risk factor for HIV infection (UNAIDS
2000), and where a sexual double standard often means that women are penalized
far more than men for their sexual transgressions.
5. For example, in 1968 Caldwell noted that in Nigeria a surprising proportion of women longed for a non-traditional marriage, one with much more spousal
companionship and one where this companionship was reected in sexual matters
(in Orubuloye et al. 1997:1201).
6. As of 2006, the current U.S. administration is replacing previous welfare
programs with experimental marriage promotion programs as a strategy for
poverty alleviation. According to this model, low-income heterosexual couples can
receive monetary incentives and counseling (often religious in nature) for getting
married, but they do not necessarily receive funding for education and job training.
Evidence suggests that this plan puts the cart before the horse: the Minnesota Family Investment Program, for example, found that marriage rates among the poor
increased after welfare funds were used to provide job training, child care, and
earned income disregards (a policy in which employment income doesnt result
in the cancellation of welfare benets). See also Lane et al. 2004 for a trenchant critique of marriage promotion policies.
7. Those concerned with the extent to which marriage has come to be perceived as a project for personal satisfaction rather than a fundamental building
block of social organization, however, have a good point, which is that structurally
strong marriages were one way of efciently managing a number of vital aspects of
social reproduction (cooking, the care of the young and the old, etc.).